The cat on a hot tin roof? Critical considerations in multilingual language assessments.
Thandeka Mdlalo, Penelope S Flack, Robin W Joubert
PMID 31170786WHAT IT FOUND
IsiZulu-speaking children read language screening pictures through their own culture.
A black cat on a roof was seen as danger, not rescue, and slow answers to English questions could look like word-finding problems.
Key findings
01Picture 8 was the most controversial picture, and most focus group participants regarded rescuing a black cat as inviting danger.
02Slow responses and pauses to English questions may be word detection in a second language, not word-finding problems.
03The urban children did not like the black cat picture because of cultural associations, while the rural children's fear was not culturally related, so urban and rural stereotypes should not be used.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only the children's responses were analysed in this article, so the paper does not show the other viewpoints it mentions. The study did not report whether adapting the picture changed assessment decisions. The sample was 90 children aged 6 to 8 years from low socio-economic backgrounds in South Africa, so it may not apply to other ages, languages or settings. The Renfrew Action Picture Test was used qualitatively and not scored for language disorder, so the study cannot show how often the test would be read as a language problem.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat every unusual response as proof of cultural bias or disorder. The study showed specific examples with children and used the Renfrew Action Picture Test qualitatively, not to identify language disorders.